There comes a moment in the life of many a great economist when he (it is usually a he, often French) becomes famous due to a trashy tabloid scandal.
It happened when IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested, later cleared, for assaulting a hotel maid in New York, which likely cost him the French presidency as more sexual escapades were exposed.
ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty ImagesFrench Culture and Communication minister Aurelie Filippetti arrives at the Elysee Presidential palace in Paris to attend a lunch with the French President.
It happened twice to the transatlantic heartthrob monetary historian Niall Ferguson, first when he left his wife for the anti-Islamist firebrand Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and again when he said John Maynard Keynes, the great macroeconomic theorist, was gay, childless and “effete,” and thus selfish and insensitive to future generations.
So it is now with Thomas Piketty, the neo-Marxist economist du jour whose new book on inequality, Capital In The Twenty-First Century, has inspired left-leaning politicos from French President Francois Hollande and the British Labour Party to Justin Trudeau’s economic star Chrystia Freeland.
On the weekend, it emerged Mr. Piketty was once arrested, held and accused, though not charged, with domestic violence, making him the latest bright light of the dismal science to endure tabloid debasement arising from his sex life.
It is a juicy story for a country still reeling from the ill-fated love affairs of its president, not least because Mr. Piketty’s alleged victim, whom he dated until early 2009, is Aurélie Filippetti, then a Socialist Party spokesperson, now Culture Minister of France.
ALAIN JOCARD/AFP/Getty Images A picture taken on April 4, 2014 shows French President Francois Hollande, front centre, posing with France's newly appointed Prime Minister Manuel Valls, front fourth from the left, and members of the government , including Aurelie Filippetti, back row, second from the right.
According to reports, she ended a two-year relationship with Mr. Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, in February 2009, after an episode that led her to flee their Left Bank apartment for a police station, where she was in distress as she reported the violence and was medically examined.
She withdrew the charge, reportedly to spare her daughter, then 15, from knowing about it.
The British Daily Mail quoted an investigating officer and Mr. Piketty, both of whom confirmed the arrest.
“The case closed five years ago,” Mr. Piketty said. “There was no factual or legal basis to pursue it.” One report said he had apologized, though at the time he dismissed the allegations as “stories from the gutter.”
Ms. Filippetti is a recurring figure on French gossip pages. She wrote a roman à clef about her affair in 2003 with a married journalist, full of torrid sexual passages, which prompted the journalist’s wife to write her own memoir of the period, which recently won a literary prize, which was presented, ironically, by Ms. Filippetti herself. A film version is reportedly in the works.
Mr. Piketty, a longtime French Socialist Party advisor as well as an academic economist, attracts similar interest. Since Capital was published in English last month, he has enjoyed incredible attention for an economist, especially in the U.S., where an early wave of support was met by massive criticism, all over a book that, at 700 dense pages, few are likely to read. It has already sold out its first run, leading Financial Times managing editor Robert Shrimsley to suggest they are ending up in people’s bathrooms, between Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History.
In a cheeky anthropological take on what he called the Piketty Bubble, Mr. Shrimsley sketched the nine stages of popular attention, from “buy in,” when big thinkers feel they must discuss him, to adoption by politicians and pundits, through backlash and counter-offensive, into petty arguments about who has actually read the thing. From there, it progresses through boredom into disassociation, in which “even supporters begin to be embarrassed to refer to him.”
The historical scandal from his love life makes for a particularly modern stage ten.
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The ideas in Capital, ambitiously titled similarly to the great work of Karl Marx, make for a theoretical rebuttal to the notion that societies become more equal as their economies mature. The notion that inequality is rising is nothing new — it was a major complaint of the Occupy movement — but the reasons are not clear and hotly debated. Mr. Piketty’s observation is that, generally, inequality rises when the rate of return on capital is greater than the growth rate of the economy. So those who hold wealth get richer faster than those who earn wages, and capitalism ends up entrenching inequality.
AP Photo/Harvard Press, Emmanuelle MarchadourFrench economist Thomas Piketty. In his new book, Piketty, who helped popularize the notion of a privileged 1%, sounds a grim warning: The U.S. economy is beginning to decay into the aristocratic Europe of the 19th century.
Unusually for an economist, he illustrates this with reference to popular modern American TV shows and the 19th century novels of Honoré de Balzac, Jane Austen and Henry James, which in comparison reveal a “huge change in the social representation of inequality,” Mr. Piketty writes.
“No contemporary novelist would fill her plots with estates valued at 30 million euros as [those authors] did. Explicit monetary references vanished from literature after inflation blurred the meaning of the traditional numbers,” he writes. “In contemporary fiction, inequalities between social groups appear almost exclusively in the form of disparities with respect to work, wages and skills. A society structured by the hierarchy of wealth has been replaced by a society whose structure depends almost entirely on the hierarchy of labor and human capital… In Dirty Sexy Money we see decadent young heirs and heiresses with little merit or virtue living shamelessly on family money. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule, and any character who lives on wealth accumulated in the past is normally depicted in a negative light, if not frankly denounced, whereas such a life is perfectly natural in Austen and Balzac and necessary if there are to be any true feelings among the characters.”
MEHDI FEDOUACH/AFP/Getty ImagesU.S. actor Bruce Willis is awarded as Commandeur des Arts et lettres (Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters) by French Culture minister Aurelie Filippetti during a ceremony at the ministry in Paris on Feb. 11, 2013.
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